Long Distance Calling
Avoid The Light

THE REVIEW

Agenda: for once, heed the album title. Avoid any light source that might invest, streak, distort, or metamorphose the chiaroscuro scattered throughout the six, lengthy tracks of the second long-distance effort by the German post-rock quintet. Well, I’ve more or less told you, now it's up to you to exorcise the fear of once again facing yet another batch of Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky disciples—because, mind you, there’s no canonical yin/yang here: above the guitars, the network of keyboards, the double kick drum, the glitches, the ruptures, the pre and post, a dense noir atmospheric frost wraps itself, lending genuine and uniquely personal charm to an epic already disadvantaged at the starting blocks due to inevitable comparisons and rejections of the specific label for sadly excessive overcrowding (especially in recent years).

I would be foolish to want to assert, at all costs, the sonic originality of Long Distance Calling, as if to wool my ears with ham and deny the inevitable genealogical descent via the Scottish moor or Louisville, USA. That’s not the point. It wouldn't be worth insisting on formations devoid of potential or meticulously searching for their own (non) identity to steer toward dubious stylistic choices, and the fact that, here and now, "Avoid The Light" eradicates any corpuscle of doubt is something to be significantly taken into account.

The Germans, maxima reductio, know how to write truly fantastic songs. And, rather than cultivating that endless series of sterile arpeggios declined into melanchol(y) so plundered by ill-mannered sons of unknown mothers in the last decade, they target physical impact: they prioritize volume over contrast. You can tell right away, but it’s with "I Know You, Stanley Milgram!" that the work’s manifesto is fully drafted: an opening with feedback and chimes, a dry and unexpected percussive swipe, a Tool-like riff soaked in stoner that devastates the perfect harmony created here. Nothing more, nothing less. In any case, you’ve come to the wrong neighborhood if you’re looking to dive into the basest introspection, which can still be glimpsed in the only sung episode, courtesy of the kind—and drawled—Jonas Renkse of Katatonia, the saccharine and somewhat sui generis gothic of "The Nearing Grave". Stop.

Proceed as you like: roughly following structures, trusting the writer, peeking behind the icy shutters that "Sundown Highway" lowers, almost Red Sparowes-like, analyzing meticulously frame by frame. Any method considered cannot, ultimately, subtract an ounce of objective beauty from what is to be heard. There isn’t a track that stands out over the others in a sharp, overbearing manner: some will prefer the opening with "Apparitions", so cinematic and dreamy as to joyfully welcome the post-metal intrusiveness of the thunderous closing guitars, others will go for "Black Paper Planes", remarkable in combining a NWOBHM approach—it is Germany after all, don’t you think?—on the dreamy wings of an exquisite melody, while the rest will choose the lazy (and satisfied) "359°", a roughly faithful take of For Carnation's essence, crescendo with a seductive tête-à-tête instrumental robustly planted in the middle and dramatic opening of strings.

Let darkness fall.